What Doesn't Kill Us quickly became my top read of the year. Set in 1970s Yorkshire during the era of the Yorkshire Ripper, the novel follows Liz, a young police officer navigating a male-dominated force while dealing with the ever-present threat of violence. The killer is fictionalized as "The Butcher," but the fear and tension echo the real events of that time.

Liz's struggles go beyond her professional life—after being abused by her boyfriend, she seeks refuge in a women's commune, hiding her police identity. Torn between her duty and the bonds she forms with the women, Liz faces the harsh realities of sexism, misogyny, and violence that still resonate today.

The novel's themes are powerful and relevant, shedding light on gender and social inequality that persists. With sharp writing, vivid characters, and a well-paced narrative, What Doesn't Kill Us is both gripping and thought-provoking—a must-read for anyone, especially young women.

I really loved how the time-period of the 70s was brought to life in this book. It really helped to backdrop the context of the feminist movement. Definitely a page-turner!

Ok . I lived in Leeds in the late 70s and early 80s so know the situation with the Yorkshire ripper well. This book describes that period , the circumstances and women's lives at that time well. There are a lot of characters and it did take me a while to get around who they all are. The book is fairly fast paced at the beginning and towards the end. The middle part is more about the actions of the feminist women's group and the group living together in the house on Cleopatra Street. All of the book describes misogyny and the attitudes to women at work at that time. I would have preferred a shorter middle part and more later in the book to finish off the women's stories.
Not a bad read , though in parts it was hard going, it was too drawn out in places.
Thanks to Net Galley for the ARC

I was interested in this book, it's the second book I've read recently based around these times in the late 1970's, early 1980's. I enjoyed the beginning of the book, meeting Liz, a young police woman who wants to move up into CID. The writing portrays the feelings and views of people at that time, so may not always be politically correct, but it definitely gives an accurate account of how things were then. The book recounts a story similar to the Yorkshire Ripper who sent fear into women all across the country. Whilst it started well, it did, for me, slow up as the storyline moved on and I found my interest wasn't held as much. There is also a lot of regional dialect and this did make it difficult to follow at times. I did however found my interest reignited as the book came to an end, and I liked how the author finished it.

What Doesn't Kill Us is my top read of the year so far (I know it's early days, but still...). To say I was gripped is an understatement.

It's set in the 1970s, in the time and place where the Yorkshire Ripper murders occurred. He is called 'The Butcher' in this telling and the identities of the victims are fictional, but there are many similarities in terms of the police investigation and various events. I cannot write about it without comparing it to another wonderful book with the same setting that I read a few months ago: The List of Suspicious Things by Jennie Godfrey. Both are stories about the lives of people living in Yorkshire under the menace of a vicious serial killer.

It was fascinating to read about the same era from two such different perspectives. The List of Suspicious Things is from the point of view of a child who does not really understand what is happening in the community. What Doesn't Kill Us is from the perspective of the people all too conscious of what is going on: young women, potential victims.

And not just victims of a serial killer. Victims every day of deeply embedded sexism and misogyny. Victims of racism (also a theme in The List of Suspicious Thing). Victims of abusive husbands and partners. And yes, victims of other women sometimes.

Liz is a young police officer. She's ambitious, but quickly realising that the career prospects for women on the police force are virtually non-existent. It's a man's world, where the only attention she's likely to attract is due to her gender, her body, rather than to her intelligence or skill. However, she does get an opportunity to work as a detective on the case, hunting The Butcher. Her role is largely to get the wife out of the room when she and her superior officer interview potential suspects in their homes [Liz proposes tea and follows the wife to the kitchen]. And nobody pays much attention to her insights.

However, when Liz"s boyfriend beats her up (again), she is taken in by a group of women who share a house. The household and regular visitors include (ex-)prostitutes, feminist activists and various other women seeking refuge from men, and from male violence. It's essentially an all-women commune. As they are all deeply distrustful of the police, Liz hides the fact that she is a police officer, telling them instead that she serves in the police canteen. With a foot in both camps, therefore, Liz's loyalties are torn.

Sexism, misogyny and male violence against women are what this novel is all about. Every page of it made me seethe — with anger, indignation and helpless fury. I remember the '70s. I was in or about Liz's age at that time. I was reading Fay Weldon and Doris Lessing and Germaine Greer et al back then. While most people will tell you that the world has changed a lot since then, some things have not changed at all. There may be better career prospects for women, in general (I know that I speak from a position of privilege), but sexism and misogny are still with us, and men continue to beat the shit out of women on a regular basis. And yes, there is still a hierarchy of victims, with middle class, white, pretty (straight!), 'nice' girls garnering the most sympathy and attention.

The novel also deals with the theme of extremism, raising questions about political activism and to what extent the ends justify the means.

Everyone should read What Doesn't Kill Us. Especially young women. Women who have been fooled into thinking those days are long gone. They're not. It's also highly relevant today in a wider sense, looking beyond gender inequality to social inequality in a society that is today seething and politically destabilised, much like it was in the 70s.

Moving on from the themes to the more technical aspects, What Doesn't Kill Us is an excellent, totally immersive novel. The pacing is balanced, moving smoothly from intense dialogues to action. The characters leap from the page. The writing is very skillful, revealing characters in a few telling words. It's insightful. And it's occasionally very funny.

In short, I loved it.

Thanks to the author, publisher and Netgalley for the ARC. All my reviews are 100% honest and unbiased, regardless of how I acquire the book.

Over the past year or so, I've been searching for any fiction at all that deals with the WLM or with British second-wave feminism in the 1970s and 1980s. It seems like such a rich subject for historical novelists, and yet I found nothing that puts the WLM centre-stage (it's mentioned in Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other and Eva Moreda's Home Is Like A Different Time). So yeah, Close gets huge kudos from me just for choosing this topic. And What Doesn't Kill Us is impressively well-researched, bringing to life the revolutionary feminist scene in Leeds in the late 1970s. Close is especially interested in the debates about female separatism and sex with men that have been accused of 'splitting' the WLM after its stormy 1978 conference and ultimately leading to its downfall. She has her central group of characters write and publish a fictional version of the manifesto 'Love Your Enemy?', which argued that feminists should not sleep with men, as well as taking part in a series of arson attacks against sex shops that, in real life, were claimed by the anonymous group Angry Women. From a historical perspective, I thought her take was impeccably nuanced. I especially liked the fact that she unpicks the homophobic narrative that 'political lesbians' caused the WLM to splinter by pointing out that many of the women who were most invested in the 'Love Your Enemy?' version of female separatism were not lesbians, and many lesbians, even political ones, rejected the ideas put forward by the Leeds group. She also pays particular attention to class division within the collective she focuses on, but doesn't reduce this to working-class versus 'bourgeois'; her many working-class characters all have different views on the new direction that feminism is taking, as do the middle-class women.

Does this work as a novel? Yes, but I had some reservations. What Doesn't Kill Us has two major plot threads. One is the emergence of revolutionary feminism in Leeds that I talked about above, and the way the women's tactics change, putting the group in greater danger. The second sees police investigate a fictionalised version of the Yorkshire Ripper; a serial killer is at work in the city, making women afraid to walk after dark. This novel also has two narrators. The bulk of it is narrated by Liz, a white working-class police constable who comes to live at the women's collective after she leaves her abusive boyfriend, but who hides her job from them. However, we also get significant sections from Charmaine, a mixed-race (white/African-Caribbean) woman who is at art college and takes part in the activism of the central group of characters, although she doesn't live with them. There's a lot to say about these narrative choices. Although I think a lot of writers add multiple narrators for the sake of it, it struck me that if there ever was a novel that needed more narrative perspectives, it's this one. The collective is full of fascinating women, and I would have loved to hear from some of them. I was also sorry that so much of the novel is dominated by Liz and the police investigation, when I wanted to hear more from Charmaine and the other women.

I really struggled with Liz as a narrator. In short, I didn't like her. Close makes her feel authentic and distinctive, but I just didn't want to spend so much time in her company. Liz is defeatist, miserable and jaded. She has every right to be so, especially at the start of the novel, but I wish we could have seen more of a change in her as her story develops; some of her beliefs are different by the end, and she's questioning her own sexuality, but she's very much the same person. This wasn't helped, for me, by the heavy use of dialect in Liz's chapters, which occasionally felt a bit try-hard. The prose was difficult to follow at times, not just because of the dialect but because of the limited ways in which Liz thinks. In some ways, this is a triumph - we really get inside Liz's head - but I wanted to get out of it again. Charmaine, on the other hand, is written very differently, even though she also comes from a working-class Leeds background. I loved her chapters and wanted much more of them. It was a shame, also, that the conclusion to the police investigation dominates the end of the novel, whereas Liz and Charmaine's stories end rather abruptly.

What Doesn't Kill Us is so original and so necessary that I can forgive it a great deal. It's also currently shouldering the burden of being the only novel about these times. It made me think about just how badly we need more fiction about women's liberation.

Misogyny is alive and well on the cusp of the 1980s - in the streets of Leeds where a serial killer stalks, and in the police force, where women are routinely derided or patronized.

PC Liz Sealey knows all about it, because she is on the frontline - on all fronts. Facing domestic abuse at home and derision from some of her college on the the task force investigating the slayings, she finds an unexpected source of camaraderie in the women who gather at a house located in a nearby street.

This is a group of those who are fed up and angry at the injustice they see all around them, most recently exemplified by the reign of terror wrought by the killer's brutal actions. But the problem goes far deeper that, and Liz knows it just as well as the others do. But can she allow herself to be drawn into something that goes directly against her duty as a police officer?

This story has elements all too familiar even in 2024, and is a gut punch to those who like to claim that there is no disparity in the situations of women and men in the UK today. Written in a voice that is both RAW and authentic, Close has given us a book worth reading. It gets 3.5 stars.